The Great Experiment

I thought of it as the year of The Great Experiment.  Some of the church folks who gave me permission and then endured it probably remember it as The Great Disaster. It all came about because I took the Scripture too seriously.  In I Corinthians 12:7, the Word says, "To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good." In this section about spiritual gifts it also says, "...there are varieties of gifts,,,but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone."  (I Corinthians 12:4-6)  The book of Romans speaks of each of us having gifts that differ ((Romans 12:6) and Ephesians 4:12 speaks of spiritual gifts being given "to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ."  

My simple way of thinking led me to believe that everyone had a spiritual gift useful for building up the body of Christ.  My conclusion was to get rid of the committees the General Church said were necessary and to create a program structure which was based on the idea that spiritual gifts should determine the missions and ministry of the church.  To make it simple: there would be no evangelism committee or children's ministry unless someone came forward convinced that such a ministry was their spiritual gift.  The programs and missions of the church would be based on spiritual gifts God had given to each one of us individually instead of a structure passed down to us.  

As I recall some programs and missions went well and some which we had always done lacked the support to go forward.  What I remember most is that it drove the hard liners who said, "This is the way it has always been done" absolutely crazy.  Maybe the church actually operates in such a way in some places, but in the year of The Great Experiment, we either lacked the faith for it to happen, or a preacher was trying to put the square pegs of the Kingdom in the round holes of the institutional church.